Let’s get the stuff I enjoy about this game out of the way first. ⚪ The storyline is immediately engaging, and you WANT to find out what is happening. ⚪ The look of the game is fitting, and it all feels connected with the different ‘biomes. ⚪ There is a healthy mix of Classic and New Disney in this game; it leans more towards newer Disney, but that was expected. ⚪ Lots of small collections are scattered across and your rewards are more storyline and some pictures from the films. ⚪ I love how most people in this community have collectively come to the decision to have massive farms so that you can just continuously make money quickly. ⚪ I like that you must talk to different characters to get the different bonuses (for mining, farming, foraging, crafting, fishing etc) and the more you work up your relationship level, they can produce more valuable items, though this isn’t 100% all the time. ⚪ I like that every ‘biome’ is decorated with a theme: snow, plaza, forest, darkness, desert plains, elephant graveyard. ⚪ The different buildings are well themed to each character and the outer design of the buildings themselves are cool as well. ⚪ The repetitive cycle of the game is just as addictive as the ones from more established games such as Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons. Now, onto the things I have issue with. First things first, the animations break all the time. Through out my many hours in this game, characters would just break in their walk animations and just glide passed me and, sometimes, they would be dominating in a t-pose as they did so. The animation problems are heightened whenever it comes to characters or animals that swim or fly. Both Ariel and Ursula are often wading within rocks or popping their heads through the bridges and the swimming animations alone are just so incredibly lazy and janky. This goes mostly for Ariel. Story quests, while fun, get completely overrun by boring and irritating friend quests. Games have side quests, yes, but this game makes you feel as if you’re about to do 50 exams. A lot of the quests DO NOT work properly and are still bugged to the day of writing this review. Take the Ursula quest. This quest is so broken that it resets your completed tasks sometimes, so you continuously must try and complete the quest before it breaks again. Several time I had to visit that overly chatty Takoyaki and several times, I then had to piss about with trying to place her stupid house. Simple things like watering crops will inexplicably leave ONE crop being unable to be watered until you re-log. The clothing side of the game is the most customisation that you will be getting and a lot of the time (for a very long time) you are stuck with ‘vaguely resembles this franchise’ clothing. God help you if you don’t want to wear ball gowns, dresses or skirts because that is 99% of the clothing. You CAN customise clothing with a blank template of specific clothing (no designing trousers for you) but it’s like being given play-doh and told to sculpt a replica of the London Eye. It’s not good enough. And let’s not pretend that this game was ‘made for children’ because Disney knows that older people are getting this game, so having basic stencils to design your clothing is both boring and old school. Also, screw you if you want to have long straight hair or a fringe that doesn’t look like it’s been cut using the bowl technique because you aren’t getting it. You know, despite most Disney characters of both genders having these attributes. Going back to the ‘old school’ thing for a second. A FULL priced game with an in-game shop. There is no excuse for this anymore. Let us earn the items with the multiple currencies you have us get. You aren’t strapped for cash, Disney, get out of here. -- The islands that you rarely get to visit, to gather more characters, you will only need to visit ONCE. No resources will spawn there, no special decorative items, no storylines are that particularly linked to the bigger story. Sure, you can expand the main village but, travelling to distant islands shouldn’t just be a ‘collect this character’ quest only. It would be a lot better if those islands had exclusive resources on them to make the world feel bigger than just the village you are building. If they are one use only, then don’t make it possible for us to travel back to them because they are just empty TINY voids when you have taken the character out of there. They have nothing anymore. -- There is a chance that when you interact with a portal, your character will flicker and jump around the screen before finally just standing there. This can break and crash your game. This happened SEVERAL times (this is mainly for Olaf’s quest that I noticed this the most) and I was worried I had a permanently broken save file but by the power of grey skull, it let me complete the quest. During cutscenes there’s a chance that there will be a double of either your character or the Disney character and a lot of the time they will be in t-pose. -- An extra complaint I have is that the game is shockingly quiet when it comes to voice acting (apart from the repeating lines) and I just assumed that at least MOST of the lines would be voiced. Y’know, being a full priced Disney game and everything. But whatever. Take the game with a pinch of salt. If you like cosy games with a story, wait for this game to go on sale before you buy it.
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